• Ranking of Nordic Universities, 2022

    Rank Institution Change from 2021 ARWU QS THE USNWR Average World Rank UR Karolinska Institute 🇸🇪 NA 41 NR 49 51 47 🥇 University of Copenhagen 🇩🇰 – 39 82 114 42 69.25 🥈 University of Oslo 🇳🇴 – 67 101 126 89 95.75 🥉 University of Helsinki 🇫🇮 – 92 106 110 99 101.75 […]

  • Ranking of Finnish Universities, 2022

    Rank Institution Change from 2021 ARWU QS THE USNWR Average World Rank 🥇 University of Helsinki (Helsingin yliopisto) – 92 106 110 99 101.75 🥈 Aalto University (Aalto-yliopisto) – 301 116 201 273 222.75 🥉 University of Turku (Turun yliopisto) – 401 291 351 342 346.25 UR University of Vaasa (Vaasan yliopisto) NA NR NR […]

  • LaMDA is not sentient

    You might have read news stories about a Google engineer who recently claimed that an AI language model (LaMDA) is sentient. As many people have pointed out, LaMDA is definitely not sentient. They are correct. I also happen to think that the socio-cultural phenomenon of news articles about whether or not some certain AI is […]

  • Top 10 Baltic Universities, 2021

    Rank Institution ARWU QS THE USNWR Average World Rank 🥇 University of Tartu 🇪🇪 401 300 251 255 301.75 🥈 Riga Stradins University 🇱🇻 NR 801 501 NR 651 🥉 Vilnius University 🇱🇹 701 400 801 735 659.25 UR Estonian University of Life Sciences 🇪🇪 NR NR 801 NR 801 4 University of Latvia 🇱🇻 […]

  • Literature in Wittgenstein’s Language §8

    I was privileged enough to have the opportunity to take the late Barry Stroud’s final Later Wittgenstein course for undergraduates at Berkeley, back in 2017. In addition to inspiring many more traditional philosophical writings, it also inspired this slightly more unusual piece (which I didn’t hand in…though perhaps I should have!). Enjoy!

  • Ranking of Universities in the European Union, 2021

    Rank Institution Change from 2020 ARWU QS THE USNWR Average World Rank UR Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) University 🇫🇷 NA 38 44 40 NR ~ 40.67 UR Karolinska Institute 🇸🇪 NA 42 NR 39 48 43 🥇 Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich 🇩🇪 – 48 64 32 46 47.5 🥈 Technical University of […]

  • Ranking of Finnish Universities, 2021

    * This ranking is for the year 2021. See the newest, 2022, ranking here: https://snmcgannon.com/2022/10/25/ranking-of-finnish-universities-2022/ Rank Institution Change from 2020 ARWU QS THE USNWR Average World Rank 🥇 University of Helsinki (Helsingin yliopisto) – 82 104 101 94 95.25 🥈 Aalto University (Aalto-yliopisto) – 301 112 201 275 222.25 🥉 University of Turku (Turun yliopisto) […]

  • Ranking of Nordic Universities, 2021

    * This ranking is for the year 2021. See the newest, 2022, ranking here: https://snmcgannon.com/2022/11/02/ranking-of-nordic-universities-2022/ Rank Institution Change from 2020 ARWU QS THE USNWR Average World Rank UR Karolinska Institute 🇸🇪 NA 42 NR 39 48 43 🥇 University of Copenhagen 🇩🇰 – 30 79 96 37 60.5 🥈 University of Oslo 🇳🇴 +1 61 […]

  • Do you ever wonder how English got the “han/hanen” pronoun?

    There was once a time when children in English-speaking countries were assigned one of two pronoun pairs at birth. Nowadays, most people probably don’t even remember what those were. While it’s easy to imagine that we always used the “han/hanen” pronoun pair, in fact, these words only came into use after centuries of a problematic […]

  • A Former Student Remembers Paul Rabinow

    There was this one time, during my senior year at UC Berkeley, I showed up to Anthropology of the Contemporary about a half-hour early. It was held in one of the Anthro department conference rooms — the larger one, where the AUA meetings were held, at the intersection of the hall near the waiting room […]